[The following is from the last installment of the series, “Wanted – A Congregation!” which Lloyd Douglas published in the Christian Century during the summer of 1920. This final essay is entitled, “Fifth Phase: Making Worship Worshipful,” and it was in the September 9th issue. Douglas is talking about the Order or Worship, and he says, in reference to a male quartet:]
“To render this effectively will require a great deal of patient rehearsal by the quartet; but Blue knows that when these four men begin to realize the inspirational possibilities of this part of the service, they will gladly spend the time.
“You and I have a great deal to say about the wickedness of the stage, and doubtless there is even more that might be said on the same subject; but we should be ashamed when we remember that the stage is able to grip the public’s imagination because of the indefatigable zeal and patience with which the actors school themselves in their parts. Why, before a performance is actually presented, and during the last few days of rehearsal, these people toil for uninterrupted hours, pausing neither for meals nor sleep, that they may work together to produce the desired effect at certain psychological moments! And, sometimes, preachers go into the pulpit and try to read a hymn on the spur of the moment and bungle and fumble and haggle at it until the sensitive want to cry out in mingled pain and disgust. No less often, they do not know what the Scripture Lesson is to be until the opening hymn is being sung; and they get up and read it without any advance preparation whatsoever. More frequently, they haven’t the vaguest notion what the pastoral prayer is going to consider, or how it is going to consider it – a terra incognito, both as to form and content!
“Any preacher who in his practice of ophthalmology tries to remove the mote from the eye of the actor, while himself guilty of such blunders of indolence and indifference, had better desist until he is able to extract the two-by-four which interferes with his own vision. But that isn’t get on very fast with Blue’s new order of service, is it?”
[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]
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